Digging: The Workers Of Boston's Big Dig

Rating:
Summary: A testament to the effort of man
Review: The "Big Dig" in Boston is the largest construction task ever to be undertaken by mankind, surpassing that of the building of the Panama Canal. Michael Hintlian's ongoing committment to document the work of the Big Dig has yielded powerful photographs, which appear in Digging. The images in Digging artistically capture the construction, with an emphasis on showing that the backbreaking, hands-on labors of men--not just machines--are what made it all possible.

Rating:
Summary: Making Art of Documentary Photography
Review: With the publication of Digging: The Workers of Boston's Big Dig, Michael Hintlian claims his place as one of the most important photographers working today.

At its most basic, Digging is to the workers of Boston's Big Dig, the endless construction project that has remade the face of downtown Boston, what Lewis Hine's work from the early 1930s is to the workers who built the Empire State Building: a memorial in photographs to the pure muscle power that makes real the dreams of engineers. Hintlian set out more than four years ago to preserve for the ages the contribution of the workers whose daily toil would otherwise be forgotten when the last concret was poured and the Big Dig was finally finished.

But Digging is far, far more than an ambitious work of documentary photography. For the more time Hintlian spent in the bowels of the earth beneath Boston, the more he seems to have realized what a surrealistic undertaking the Big Dig is, and the more surrealistic his work became. The traditional documentary photographer who initially donned workboots and warm winter gear to negotiate the mud of what was then the world's largest construction site, morphed over the years into an art photographer, a surrealist art photographer.

For the images that fill the pages of digging include the workers of Boston's Big Dig, but they include them as part of compositions whose beauty has more to do with light and shadow, with the interplay of shapes and forms, and with irony and the juxtaposition of objects and formss, than it does to do with workers and their tasks.

Digging: The Workers of Boston's Big Dig is a work of documentary photography, and it is a tribute to the men who dug the Big Dig. But it is also a work of photography as fine art. And as such it is not to be missed by anyone who cares about either documentary photography, or the art of photography.